Roald Amundsen: A Private Life

1928, Tromso, Norway

The room is full already and still not ready. Maps everywhere. Telegrams. Men outside pretending not to hurry while every sound says hurry. Tromso has that waiting hush northern ports get when the engines are not yet started but everyone has already left in the mind. They call this rescue and I do not dispute the word because men are on ice and delay is a kind of killing, but rescue is never the whole of anything once committees, newspapers, debts, old rivalries, and one’s own unfinished reputation have entered the business. I feel my hands when I fold a chart now. The joints say what the newspapers never print. A man who spent twenty years in ice and cold water carries that in the tissue and eventually the tissue sends its accounts. I have paid what I owe on that front and do not object to paying it. What I object to is the possibility that the account might arrive at a moment that forecloses work still worth doing. That is the margin I am watching more carefully than my hands now. I am slower. Not slow enough to stay ashore. Not yet. If I do stay ashore, others will go north and make the answer theirs. If I go, the sea may close over the aircraft and settle the matter another way. That is the margin. Small. Immediate. Real. I know it. That is why I write now, before motion takes over and every explanation becomes too late.